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A heated debate recently spread widely on social media, after a user asked a query to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best hypothetical scenarios, it exposed wildly different perspectives and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely cause a deep personal dilemma if you thought on it extensively. There was also the almost inevitable follow-up in which some males took to the internet to tell women how stupid they had been for choosing the animal and went on to limn the consequences they merited for it. This at least allowed those females who were uncertain over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively dramatises this clever little setup. This six-episode series is based from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated two years later for an English audience). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (the lead actor) and his family when they arrive to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, a remote village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place lacking many joys, none of the locals particularly appreciate his puritanical approach to alcohol and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which hails the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him in direct opposition with the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon collaborating against him include the lawman the sheriff Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the intimidating factory proprietor the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling upon seeing his crushed hand, and anyone else who benefit from a community easily swayed with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy shopkeeper Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, in fairness, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes once itinerant painter Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of exceptional unsettling intensity). While they remain – like the pastor himself – only a little more than caricatures, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

Once the foundations of tension planted, it is time to get down to narrative business. The servant employed by the doctor, Hilda (Eleonoora Kauhanen), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Signs of her flight and bear markings on a tree are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods circulate, but the pastor holds a different view which he and his ward set out to verify.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a somewhat peculiar show. It creates a strong impression of the bleakness that allows distrust and prejudice and dark myths flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of men. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life led by the residents, in which brutality, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, poised to explode. Yet the personas rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, good and evil intensify, emblematic figures in a fable – which stops the whole thing fully becoming immersive.

Stylistic Shifts

And then, there are numerous tonally jarring instances where the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and discern the maid’s destiny becomes nearly laughable. He stands observing shattered containers and clumps of hair in hay barns as a fusion of the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – with Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom had to lick a blend of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was definitely dried blood at the crime scene), before announcing his newest conclusion and extracting a corpse out of a swamp.

Clashing Agendas

The local leaders are bent on demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, maybe to preserve the calm, or possibly to protect one of their own. The pastor is intent on proving the opposite, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. At its best, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the TV version some years back of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it’s more like Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Nevertheless, it appears to offer the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series streams on Disney+ currently.